Page visits on the World Wide Web are often inquisitive or exploratory in nature. Many users rely on a search engine to help them locate web pages containing the information or resources they are in search of. A search engine performs the search based on a conventional search method. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the global population of available documents.
Once a user leaves a result set generated by a search engine by entering a recommended origin web page, the user is often no longer relying on the resources and knowledge acquired by the search engine. When navigating the World Wide Web, the user is often confronted with a multitude of hyperlinks on an origin web page, each able to take the user to a new or different destination web page. The user may choose from any number of these hyperlinks, but often has to retrieve the content of the destination web page to determine if it contains the information or resources desired. Information available to the user to help in selecting a hyperlink is often generated by the publisher of either the origin or destination web page, and may be misleading, biased, or out of date, providing little insight to the user.
Upon viewing the destination web page's content after selecting a hyperlink based on the available information, the user may find that the destination page does not contain the type or amount of information or resources desired, forcing a return trip to the origin web page to select a different hyperlink. Often this process of navigating the World Wide Web in search of information or resources without knowing the relevance or usefulness of a destination web page before loading it consumes a large amount of the user's time. The user may perform a large number of round trips to unacceptable or inadequate destination web sites before locating the information or resources desired.
Conventional methods have attempted to solve the “blind” hyperlink navigation problem by altering the origin web page to suggest hyperlinks that, based on a variety of factors, may lead to destination web sites containing the information or resources desired by the user. (See “WebWatcher: A Tour Guide for the World Wide Web,” by T. Joachims et al. (1997).) These methods replace the original hyperlinks leading to destination web pages with hyperlinks that lead the user instead to a “Web Watcher” server device that alters the destination web page to suggest hyperlinks on the destination web page to the user. The factors used in this method to select suggested hyperlinks may not be appropriate for a particular user's needs, and the user may be steered away from non-suggested sites better suited to the user's needs. One factor used by this method is the past behavior and choices of other users of the origin web page, possibly allowing the erroneous or uninformed choices of past users to affect the current user.
Others in the art have attempted to solve the problem by altering the origin web page's content to include text or images taken from the destination web page. (See “Fluid Links for Informed and Incremental Link Transitions,” by P. T. Zeilweger et al. (1998).) In so doing, the user's primary perception of the origin web page is altered. These methods rely upon the publisher of the destination web page to provide helpful information, and may expose the user to inaccurate, biased, or out of date information. These methods do not utilize any of the user's previous queries in order to provide targeted and pertinent information about the destination web pages.
Conventional methods have utilized modern web browsers such as Microsoft Corporation's Internet Explorer™ that support JavaScript to specify information to display on the user interface when a pointing device is hovering over a hyperlink. (See “Enriched Links: A Framework for Improving Web Navigation Using Pop-Up Views,” by Gary Geisler (2000).) In these methods, the information provided to the user when the pointing device hovers over a hyperlink on an origin web page is supplied by the publisher of the destination web page associated with the hyperlink, and may expose the user to inaccurate, biased, or out of date information. The information supplied to the user in these methods is given without regard to the context of the user's previous search queries.
Various other conventional methods exist to help a user select a hyperlink in an origin web page to follow, but there does not exist an effective method or system to assist a user by generating third-party-provided information about a destination web page associated with the hyperlink at the time the user signals an interest in the hyperlink.
Thus, a need exists to provide an improved system and method for providing assisted network browsing.